I’d suggested using that bind-address value for a DHCP VMware Fedora installation in Step #7. I was trying to create an example for an isolated testing instance, which is why I set the bind-address to a localhost.localdomain value. They raised the following error when they tried to connect their base operating system’s version of MySQL Workstation to the Fedora VM:

Failed to Connect to MySQL at 192.168.2.168:3306 with user student

Failed to Connect to MySQL at 192.168.2.168:3306 with user student

or, this dialog image:

Before you do the next step, please ensure you’re using the right IP address. You can find that by running this command as an authorized sudoer:

ifconfig|grep inet.*netmask.*broadcast

ifconfig | grep inet.*netmask.*broadcast

In this case, the command returns:

inet 192.168.2.168 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.2.255

inet 192.168.2.168 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.2.255

I’ve since added instructions to the older post to set the bind-address value in the my.cnf file as follows when they want to support external connections (naturally that means authorizing port 3306):

bind-address=0.0.0.0

bind-address=0.0.0.0

After you reset the /etc/my.cnf file, you must stop and start, or restart the mysqld service. You can do that as the root user like this:

systemctl restart mysqld

systemctl restart mysqld

Then, you can test a student user connection from MySQL Workbench like this:

If the student user is authorized and the password is correct, you’ll see that the connection now works: